Final Member of French Resistance Order Dead at 101

French President Emmanuel Macron gives a eulogy for Germain at the Invalides Memorial on October 15. (Wikimedia Commons).

Hubert Germain, the last surviving member of France’s elite Order of the Liberation, died in a veterans’ hospital in Paris on October 12. French President Emmanuel Macron memorialized his death in a ceremony at the Invalides on October 15. 

France awarded The Order of the Liberation, France’s second-highest national order after the Legion of Honor, to 1,038 individuals and groups “who distinguished themselves in efforts to liberate France and the French Empire.” Daniel Cordier, another prominent member of the French Resistance and the second-to-last surviving member of the order, died at 100 in November 2020. 

Germain, the son of a general in the French colonial army, was in the process of taking his entrance exam for France’s Naval Academy in June 1940 when he learned that France planned to surrender in World War II. A message released from Macron’s office reveals that upon learning France’s intent, Germain “rose from his examination table, preferring to hand in a blank paper rather than give a blank check to the France… that had given in to resignation and renunciation.” 

Seeking to escape German occupation, Germain escaped to the U.K. on a ship carrying Polish soldiers and soon joined De Gaulle’s Free French Forces. He fought alongside Allied troops in El Alamein in Egypt, in Tunisia, and during the invasion of Italy in 1943. He returned to France on August 15, 1944, as part of the Allied invasion of Provence. “I fell into the sand and cried like a baby . . . I had returned to my country,” he recalled.

Fighting alongside the Allies until Germany's surrender, Germain later served in the French Parliament and France’s postal service, and then he acted as Telecommunications Minister from 1972 to 1974. Germain made his final public appearance in June alongside Macron at a ceremony to celebrate the founding of the French Resistance.

In a eulogy for Germain at the Invalides monument in Paris on October 15, Macron said, “He defended freedom with his brothers in arms, with his brothers in spirit—and all who recognize themselves as such—he would rebuild the brotherhood.”

“With the departure of the last representative of this knighthood of the 20th century, a page of our history is turning,” Defense Minister Florence Parly said on October 12. 

Germain is set to be buried alongside other members of the order at Mont-Valérien, a fort west of Paris selected by De Gaulle as a memorial because of its use as a Nazi execution site for resistence fighters. The burial will take place on November 11, France’s Armistice Day.